Jira's Almost Agile After 10K Interations

Somewhere near ten thousand iterations, Jira is closing in on being a full featured agile tool. Jira designers have carefully blended canonical gems like scope, danger zone, and milestone with newer, muckier terms like actual velocity and ideal velocity.

Although Shallot investigators could not find successful people using these classic terms, we did find many large tomes like The PMIBOK (Project Management Book of Knowledge) filled with talk of scope and milestones. We also learned that project managers the world over cannot overstate their delight at the ever-growing list of features, and the ever-changing Jira UI. As one PM told The Shallot, "Jira really enables us to forget about the product completely and focus entirely on the process and the colorful graphs."

At the Shallot, we are still stuck in the rut of using collaboration and communication to learn from our readers. We apologize that we may simply be be too damn dumb to "Get Jira", as evidenced by our misunderstanding that a guideline was merely a trendline. Fortunately, one of our team was able to take 80 hours of Jira training that helped us refactor our mixed up scientific nomenclature into a more concise set of popular words and phrases that puts a smile on every PM and Scrum Master we meet.

Trump Administration Discovers Scrum

Our White House sources have now confirmed that the Trump Administration see Scrum has a new secret weapon. "One pass at the Scrum propaganda and we knew this was the tool to help us better tune our well working machine. We are excited to adopt practices like like burnout charts, whip limits, and all the other mandatory practices".

Further investigation validated that the staff are natural storytellers. The following format is significantly helping The President: As the Dictator in Chief, I need to < insert random items from any Fox News program >, so that < insert words here that everyone will feel good about but completely ignore >.

"We were happy to learn that we can buy one of each certification type and decide later we have some people actually attend the actual course" said Sam Task Master, the overall transformational tranisition leader of the Uber Scrum adoption program and portfolio.

"As experts of everything we try, we're planning to release our own process called ScrumT. It is based on limited internet searches and other incomplete information and contains radical new updates like Stand There Meetings (Listening sessions with less time wasted on conversation and with more time spent fielding demands from the president)

When asked how they might know if their adoption of ScrumT is working, a spokesperson replied by saying "If everyone is following the process, we can be sure we will be successful. We just can't believe that more people have not discovered Scrum". This person asked that we not leak this story to our readers. Oops!

Bezos Look to SAFe to Save Amazon

Amazon often seems to be one of the strongest players on the planet, but don't be fooled by their fancy corporate earnings and popular technology offering. From the inside, The Shallot has learned that Amazon's evidence based focus and experiential learning are not scaling and founder Jeff Bezos is now looking at SAFe certification as their best option.

Our inside sources claim that Bezos was running down the halls screaming "SAFe is the way"." Apparently, he had just returned from a peyote retreat with the epiphany that analytics and evidence could be simply replaced by hosting a mass SAFe certification session called a SAFe of SAFe, where hoard SAFe consultants acend to simultanously program thousands of people on "How to do SAFe"

One of the newly programmed was heard saying "After all these years, we have finally found a process that is as big as Amazon. The trainers told us the process is unlimited and can easily grow to be as large and complex as needed." SAFe has a new plugin that automagically scales all infographics to include as many levels of certifications as requestd and a yearly payment plan that blows away anything Amway ever dreamed of in the past."

The leader of the SAS group (Save Amazon with SAFe) has ubiquitously installed "Bezo's bender" vending machines that serve of the game changing libation, and that the SAFe organization has licensed this delicious drink so that other SAFe practitioners can "Share the Kool-Aid" for a reasonable fee..

When we asked about all the great tools and evidence already in place at Amazon, The SAFest leader, swigging on his 64 oz magic cup, told us, "The SAFe organization was kind enough to take that off our hands at no cost to us. They have been great to deal with so far. We pay their rates and they certify us, no questions asked.

Steve Bannon To Lead the Scrum Federation

It's now clear that Steve Bannon is taking the role of CPP at the newly forming Scrum Federation (SF). It seemed clear to the founders of the Scrum Federation that the role of CPP (chief populist propagandist) was perfect for Steve.

As CPP, Bannon will popularize ways that Scrum is saving the planet that are completely free of any real evidence while also demonizing evil hackers like Ward Cunningham and Kent Beck and any others he believes to be helping by writing code and producing product with more of what he calls "fake programming"..

When asked for comment, federation's Master of Scrum Masters Mastery replied with the following documentation: "Steve's lack of any real experience with Lean, Agile or Scrum will help us think outside the tiny prescriptive Scrum box we have created over the past 20 years. As a Harvard grad, we are hoping that Steve brings some of that Boston brilliance that spawned Scrum and helped the Trump administration grow to be the flowering festival of goodness that is inspiring groups to come together with a new found collective focus."

When we asked about a CV, we were told that "people as great as Steve need only to let their reputation tell their story."

SAFe-Est: Two Great Cults Rationally Unite

The Shallott's investigative team of one can now confirm that SAFe has merged with Est to create SAFe-Est, the world's largest cult oriented movement with a process that contains the highest content of over designed bright shiny promises ever.

If you are not familiar the 1970s cult sensation of Est, you need to know that it's success included multiple books and tv shows its the thousands of followers. Not to mention a boat load of cash for the founders. Like SAFe, Est started small and grew fast with timely propaganda containing clever marketecture and infographics that people did not quite understand but could not stop looking at, like the dead animal on the side of the road that slows traffic for miles.

Dr Big Deal, the lead organization merger consultant, explained the merger as follows: "Working off the obvious success of the banking mergers in the late 2000s, SAFe-Est is destine to do well for those of us working on the merger as long as we start by saying that we need to initially focus on the fundamentals at the root of the needs for the emergence in play. We can't help but succeed if we give our inductees tools to become better and stronger followers of the new and greater processes we release.

Look for more materials on SAFe-Est at any recently closed Church of Scientology locations.

Quantum Services May Exist

Beyond Micro Services, and even Nano Services as first reported on in the 2015 edition of The Shallot, Quantum Services offer entirely new and ambiguous promises to the wildly important realm of rebranding of things that are not really new.

We are sorry to report the obvious fact that the creators of Quantum Services can never be known, or at least not known for any meaningful time period. We were able to interview the people making the most off publications and keynotes on the topic. One such expert told us that "the importance of quantum services is not the service they provide but the mere idea that they might exist. While microservices are continue to delivery must needed distractions, we hope to see a community grow around the idea that services can be so small as to not be possible to have their real valued measured without disturbing how the services work as they work at the most stateless level ever created.

In full disclosure, we have to state that this kind of brilliant new design expertise is beyond the limitations of The Shallot's IT team. Sadly, they are lost trying to use common technologies to provide services that solve existing problems instead of looking for cutting edge alternatives that inspire architects everywhere to dream up new ideas that may not work but are really interesting to talk about at a local meet up.

Secret Scrum / PMI Caucus Exposed

Correcting the Fake News reports, this image captures the founders of Scrum and PMI during secret discussions to merge the two processes as part of their Uber Unified Portfolio Program Manifesto.

Project Manager Behind on Emails

Poughkeepsie, NY - Well known to her colleagues, local Project Manager Betty McGee is behind in her emails. While most of her team, peers, and friends are cutting her slack, some are not taking it so easily.

"I had asked her if the text for the new marketing campaign was finalized or should we wait to put it on the website," said a person that wished to remain unidentified. "How long should I wait? I know she has meetings all day, but what if I don't hear back today? What do I do?"

This Shallot reporter was able to pull a favor with the NSA and find out some of the other emails awaiting Betty. These include - 47 meeting requests for the upcoming week; 52 'are you coming / going to meeting ...'; 22 youtube videos that 'have to be watched', 32 requests to review updated Sharepoint documents (2), 4 vacation requests, and 912 emails that are under 5 words and seem like nonsense.

Lotus Developer Found in the Wild

Beaver Creek, Ohio - Shallot correspondent Brett Brickly reported a most unlikely find. The discovery of a Developer Lotusorundi, also known as a certified Lotus Developer. Though few may even know what Lotus Notes is, finding a Lotus developer in the wild is as rare as finding a Colbat programmer that has gone on to do anything of interest.

Brett tells us that "The developer was most scared of my iPhone. He was certain that it was some sort of black magic wizardry in my hands and that I was probably calling the Starship Enterprise to beam him up Scotty." It was clear that he could not imagine a computer so small that was not connected to via RS232 to a real Internal Business Computer.

Engaging the developer proved even more puzzling for Brett. "For instance, I asked him if he had moved to gmail (as Lotus was an early e-mail tool). He laughed at length saying 'This is no e-mail tool. It's far too fast and far too simple to use. You cannot even put a weird spaceship template over your e-mail or add a grid that makes it impossible to read'

The interview ended as the developer scurried back into is bomb shelter, uttering something about my precious as he starred lovingly at his blackberry. Maybe the upside is that he will never be exposed to Facebook?

Kanaan Release Deadlocked in Column Naming Discussion

The latest release of Kanban is blocked due to a conflict over the organizationally recognized default column naming convention.

When asked about the situation, lead architect Gordon Nodrog expressed his frustration: 'The deadlock couldn't have happened at a worse time, we were just about to the maximum elimination of waste by doing away with the requirement that the code be related in any way to the stories.'"

We tried to find others to comment on what seemed like a simple issue, but we were unable to as the root cause of the deadlock seems to be someone changing WIP Limits while someone else was adding something to the WIP queue.

If you do not know what a deadlock is click here

Leveraging JIRA Found Critical to Creating the Best Products

Egads, Minnesota - Struggling to make an impact in an ever changing and fast moving market? Well rest those pretty eyes - after years of research by nobody of interest at Titanassian, it turns out that the only thing a company needs to do to build successful products is leverage JIRA.

Proposterous you say? Sure, understanding the actual goals and problems your customer faces sounds interesting. But have you tried it? Pretty damn hard. What is easier? Just creating a whole bunch of random lists in JIRA! No thinking required.

Looking at ways to experiment and see what works in your product? Why not experiment in JIRA! Sure, you can create endless workflows and subtasks ad infinity. All of that time simply guarantees product success as you won't be distracted by that pesky customer.

And how about product integration? Sure, your product may need to integrate with other systems or other products to actually deliver value to your audience. But let's be honest, that is tricky. Instead, just integrate a bunch of random things with JIRA - Git, maybe OpenSymphony. Hell, I'm sure you can integrate your fitbit too.

And the best part? Guaranteed product success. Remember, if everyone is buying it, it must be good.

Upon the release of this news, Mc Donalds pointed out that the health problems in America were best addressed leveraging their 'foods' and pink slime.

ScrumMaster Unprepared As Team Complains About Estimating

The Shallot has become aware of a recent trend developing in companies worldwide. It seems that Scrum Masters, after their detailed and meticulous 2-day training in all of the scrum rituals, are simply unprepared to handle the team's complaining about estimating work.

One ScrumMaster who wished to remain nameless told the Shallot that Scrum was very good, very good. Many people have said it is great, and these people, they are very smart. Some of the smartest people, really great smart people. And these people said that everything can be estimated in Scrum. And these are some smart people.

The challenge for many teams is the amount of time spent estimating unknown is wildly uninteresting and rote with error. With this actual experience, many teams have started complaining about estimating in general and prefer to learn in small, valuable product increments.

When confronted with this challenge, the ScrumMaster replied that while they personally have never built anything, they had been a manager before for a team that built something, so they are definitely qualified. And if there were any defects, they would probably run in and save the day. Maybe even get a cool car like Kitt. Oh, and everything has to be estimated in Scrum. Otherwise, they sure would look silly paying all that money for a certification.

The ScrumMaster continued rambling on some nonsense, but the Shallot reporter simply walked away to get real work done.